The Shop on Main Street

(1965, Dir.: Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, with Jozef Kroner, Ida Kaminska)

A few weeks back, I had the privilege of hearing a Holocaust survivor speak to my Derekh Torah class (she is the grandmother of one of my classmates). She told us of being a teenager in Lodz, Poland, a city with a substantial Jewish population, of how many Jews in the city actually welcomed the Germans when they invaded in 1939, because they considered them highly cultured next to their Polish brethren, and of how they were gradually disabused of this notion as they were first pushed into walled-off ghettos and then taken by cattle car to Auschwitz (she was, she told us, in five camps altogether from 1943 until they were liberated in 1945). In most respects, her story was similar to that of most survivor stories—anyone who has read Night or Maus or seen Schindler’s List would be familiar with its outlines.

What was impressed upon me was the experience of being in the room with someone who had been through the horrors and come out on the other side, of hearing their story directly, unfiltered and raw. It made me intensely aware that the very next step closer to the event is to be there yourself, and no book or film, no matter how powerful or adeptly crafted, can quite bring home that sense of closeness. My classmate’s grandmother is in her 70s; soon, in 20 or 30 years at most, the last of the survivors will leave us, and some amount of understanding will be forever unreachable. Steven Spielberg has established the Shoah Foundation to record the memories of survivors—a noble project, to be sure, though even that, I imagine, will lack a certain immediacy.

Of course, not everyone lives in a place with significant Jewish populations, and even for those who do it is not always possible to be able to talk to people who have been through these experiences (and not all survivors are willing to talk about their experiences, unsurprisingly). Either way, there is still much to be gained from what art has to say about the Holocaust, aside from its use for posterity—sometimes filters have value in their own right.

A beautiful example of this is The Shop on Main Street, an alternately hilarious and devastating film about an amiable but unambitious townsman, who, by virtue (if it can be called that) of his relationship to an important local official, finds himself appointed “Aryan overseer” to a Jewish business—a button shop owned by an elderly woman. The largely slapstick humor is derived from the fact that shopowner Mrs. Lautmann (Ida Kaminska, who was nominated for an Oscar for the role) is almost entirely deaf, and believes Tono (Jozef Kroner) has been sent to be her assistant.

Tono, having had the position pushed on him by his overbearing and grasping wife, is sympathetic to the woman—he has nothing against her, Jews, or anyone, he just wants to be left alone, a true “live and let live” philosopher. But of course events that have nothing to do with a small Czech village won’t allow that: it is there in the back of our minds, even as we laugh at Mrs. Lautmann ordering around the hapless Tono, that he will not be able to sustain this farce forever. The humor littered throughout the first half of the film only heightens the tension.

Although it was Ida Kaminska who received a nomination for her role (not undeserved, to be sure), it’s really Jozef Kroner who does the heavy lifting: his portrayal of Tono is sublime. As the terrible vicissitudes of life begin to buffet Tono about, Kroner navigates the moments from the most prosaic to the most terrible with a thoroughly genuine performance.

The Shop on Main Street brilliantly distills the size and horror of the Holocaust by focusing on a single ordinary man faced with an impossible moral litmus test: save a single life and risk his own death or sacrifice that life and live with the crushing burden of guilt. In the end, events like the Holocaust are built on millions of such moments.